Chapter 27 #2
“Five days.” He counts. He always counts.
I’ve learned to let him. “She cooks for the whole town that comes. Orcs, half-orcs, humans, the kids in their masks. I bring the ren-voshen. It cooks all the night before. There’s a thing you say at the door of an orc’s home when you bring it.
” He stops. The jaw works once. “Your hearth is mine.”
I wait to see if there’s more.
There isn’t more. He’s said the thing. He sits across my kitchen table.
The blank page is between us, the wrong ring on my hand, the cold off the harbor coming in along the sash.
He’s said your hearth is mine in four words instead of another man’s paragraph, and he isn’t asking me to say it back.
He isn’t waiting for it. He’s set it down and taken his hand off it.
I don’t say it back.
I’m not ready to say it back, and the not being ready isn’t a no.
It’s a thing I’m keeping for a door I haven’t stood at yet, and he knows the difference.
He’s spent fifteen years learning the difference between the second that’s yours to do something with and the second you crowd.
He gives me the second. I keep what’s in it.
“Okay,” I say again.
And then, because the snark is the last thing to leave and the first thing to come back and I love it for that, I say, “You walked six blocks to tell me a word means morning light and to invite me to Thanksgiving.”
“Yes.”
“You gave Olmar the keys.”
He doesn’t answer that. He didn’t think I’d know, and I don’t tell him how I know, which is that I called Olmar on Wednesday from June’s back armchair and asked him to come to Finley’s the morning of the grand opening, and Olmar said yes in three syllables that meant not for you, for Harsk, and that means Olmar’s the kind of man Harsk hands keys to.
I keep it. I don’t say it. I have a deck full of things I figured out without being told, and one more doesn’t need to go on a slide.
“Come back to the café,” he says. “I want to show you the thing I did to the carafe.”
We walk the six blocks back together for the first time, his twenty paces to my forty, neither matching, both arriving.
The light is going off Main. November does this.
The gold comes flat off the harbor end and lays itself up the brick.
It’s on the chain’s green and white arch across the street.
It’s on the plate glass that’ll be full of strangers on Tuesday.
We turn our backs on it, weather we’ve decided not to be in, and we head up the block toward Finley’s.
Olmar is locking the front door.
He has the keys in his hand, Harsk’s keys, the ring with the worn pale place on the front-door key where a thumb has gone for fifteen years, and he turns the bolt and tests the handle and works the front-door key off the ring and drops the rest in his coat pocket.
He sees us come up the block and he doesn’t make a thing of it.
He lifts his chin. The café behind him is dark, the chairs up, the carafe a shape on the front counter in the last of the light through the glass.
“Five oh one,” Olmar says, like a man reporting a fact. “She’s locked. Cat’s fed. Bar on the back door sticks. I lifted and pushed.” He holds the front-door key out on his palm. Harsk takes it.
“Thank you,” Harsk says.
“I’ve got the front of your house.” Olmar looks at me just long enough to register me, then away. It’s the courteous nod without the eyebrow, the same nod from the first morning he came into Finley’s. In orc, it means you’re at the counter with my friend, and I’m not asking. “Maggie.”
“Olmar.”
He goes up Pine toward the Bell House with the rest of the keys to my whole life in his pocket.
I don’t let it show on my face. But I think it, the small bright thing I think and don’t show.
He gave the close away. The lock, the last walk through the dark, the thing that’s been his and only his for fifteen years.
He handed it to Olmar so he could walk six blocks to a kitchen and say a word means morning light.
I’m not going to perform what that does to me. I’m going to keep it.
The back stairs are at the alley side. He goes up first. I count the creaks, because I’ve learned the building from the outside like he’s learned my building, and there’s one at the seventh step, and his weight fires it and mine doesn’t, his through the toe and mine through the heel.
The door at the top is the one I came through on the night of the bonfire.
He unlocks it and steps back. I go in first.
The apartment holds the day in the brick.
It did the last time too. The bed’s in the corner where the bed’s been for fifteen years.
The books on brewing and the books on bread are on the shelf.
The kettle’s on the small stove. The window is the harbor window with the Light a long way off across the water.
On the nightstand, on my side, the side I slept on after the bonfire, there’s a lamp.
A new lamp.
The old one is the one I put my hand into the night of the bonfire.
His elbow met my reaching at the wrong corner of the nightstand.
The lamp went over. The bulb cracked. He said I don’t regret the lamp, and I laughed into his throat.
This isn’t that lamp. This is a new one.
A plain one, a base of brown ceramic and a shade the color of paper.
It’s on my side, and it’s been on my side for weeks, since before the wall went up, since before Greg Massey.
I look at it and I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say about a man who breaks a lamp with his elbow and then buys a new one without a word and puts it on the side of the bed where the small person sleeps.
“You replaced the lamp,” I say, which is the thing I say instead of nothing.
“I put my elbow through the other one.”
“I remember.”
“I don’t regret the other one.” His eyes go past me to the lamp. “I bought the new one because the room needs a light on your side and you can’t reach the switch on mine.”
“That,” I say, “is the most romantic sentence anyone’s ever said to me, and I once dated a man who proposed at a rooftop bar with a string quartet, so you should know the bar was low.”
He doesn’t laugh out loud. He laughs low in the chest, more breath than sound, and I get it in the room more than I hear it.
I take my coat off and put it on the chair.
His comes off after mine and goes on top of it.
The two coats are a small ordinary stack on a chair, and I look at them a second longer than I mean to.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
He comes.
His hand goes to the side of my neck first, like the first time, the palm wider than I let myself measure across nine weeks of counters and one bonfire, the fingers at the hairline where the hair stops being neck, the thumb at my jaw.
I lift my chin. He tilts my head a half degree to his left so the tusk on that side clears my cheekbone by a thumb’s width, and I’ve done this with him before, I know the angle, but tonight I don’t let him do all of it. I put my own thumb on the tusk.
I do it on purpose. I do it slow. I press the pad of my thumb to the smooth of it, the place where the lower tusk rests against his lip.
The otherness of him, the thing a chain could no more build than it could be from somewhere.
I hold it there, deliberate, a hand on a thing that’s his and is now also mine to put my hand on.
He goes still under it like the morning goes still at the count of four.
“You did that the first time you kissed me,” he says, against my thumb. “The back room. Sunday. Seven o’clock.”
“I know what I did.”
“You didn’t do it slow.”
“I’m doing it slow now.”
The kiss is the kiss of a Saturday with the close given away and the deck rewritten and a word that means morning light still warm in the room.
The bonfire kiss was a yes after a long day of not saying.
The Sunday kiss was a question. This one is the kiss of two people who broke a thing and are putting it back together.
You can feel the seam where it broke. The seam holds.
He gets my sweater up over my head. He lifts it slow, the speed of a lift you stop if anything’s wrong with it, and nothing’s wrong with it.
The thin shirt under it goes after. I’m cold for one second along the ribs and then his hand is at the small of my back and the cold goes, because his hand is the temperature of a kitchen that’s been running a Diedrich since four in the morning, and I’ve stopped being surprised by how warm he is and I haven’t stopped liking it.
His hand moves up my left side.
It goes weightless. The exact moment his palm comes to the place over the ribs on the left, the pressure goes out of it.
The hand is still there but holding nothing, resting on me like a hand on a thing you’ve decided not to lean on.
I’ve had this hand on me before, the night of the bonfire, his hand going light at that exact place without his eyes going to it.
I didn’t say anything then because I didn’t understand it. I understand it now.
“My ribs,” I say. “On that side.”
“I know.”
“I broke them when I was twelve.” I haven’t told him this.
I haven’t told anyone this in years. It’s not a story, it’s a thing my body does, the catch in the breath when I lift from below shoulder height, and I’ve trained around it for twenty years and I don’t narrate it.
I narrate it now, into the slate of his throat, with his weightless hand on the place.
“There was a backyard in Sacramento. There was a cherry tree and a side gate latch. I came off the gate wrong. They never set quite right. My breath catches when I lift a thing from low. I do it without knowing I’m doing it. ”